The Power and the Story

The Obamas may have the smartest, most finely calibrated press operation in White House history, parceling out scoops (The New York Times), partisan talking points (the Huffington Post), and First Family tidbits (the celebrity mags) to a desperate media. Just don’t ask them to admit it.

Bill Burton is the baby-faced political op with a little too much junk food under his belt—and, at 31, with one of the political world’s longest résumés in media relations—who runs the pressroom at the White House. He’s got possibly the littlest office in the West Wing, but it’s where you want your West Wing office to be, guarding somebody more important than you. Burton is guarding his boss, the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs—who guards the president—from me. The Obama presidency is striving to be the most open and available in modern history, hence—and I am here on the 98th day—its first 100 days of remarkable staging, including dogs, wife, children, mother-in-law, bailouts, and handshakes and bows with dubious world leaders. But what it doesn’t want to be open about is the staging itself. One of its least favorite subjects is media. As much as the Obama-ites don’t want to be as defensive and recalcitrant as the Bushes were when it came to the press, having methodically reviewed all lessons from recent administrations, they also don’t want to seem as clever, pleased with themselves, and publicity-crazed as the Clintons, who talked endlessly of media strategies—precisely because they are much more clever and publicity-crazed.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs seems to be in total control of the media. Photo illustration by Darrow.

Even though I’ve been invited to the White House for a talk with Gibbs, there’s an abrupt cancellation when, after some chitchat with Burton, it becomes clear that my interest is in process rather than, per se, message. And then a kind of sudden vaporization—no Gibbs, according to Marissa Hopkins, his assistant, “for the foreseeable future.”

“The process aspect of media, the insider stuff, is not—it’s not our thing,” says Burton, whose entire career in the press offices of Dick Gephardt, Tom Harkin, John Kerry, and Obama during his Senate term has been about nothing but media process. “We won’t miss it if you don’t do the story.” Big cheesy smile.

There it is: the keynote affect of this most brilliant and successful and certainly calculated White House press operation is, We’re artless, really. Pay no attention to what we’re doing here—it ain’t nothin’ much.

The Clintons used the talk of great strategy as a way to mask the fact that they really had no strategy (and, too, according to one former Clintonite, because it “makes the individuals involved feel smart when they tell you how cleverly they’re manipulating the media”); the Obama team doesn’t want to talk about the meticulous calibration of everything to do with retailing its image and message because it is all so meticulously calibrated.

In part this meticulousness is just good management. The Obama administration has started with 14 professionals working in the office of the press secretary—and an astounding 47 more devoted to other aspects of media and message—which is significantly more than the communications staffs of many Fortune 500 corporations. But the media operation goes deeper than that. It’s more central than in any previous administration, and run more knowledgeably. Gibbs may be personally closer to the president than any press secretary in history; Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, is not only a press hound himself but a master at manipulating the media with juicy leaks (unlike, say, Bush’s Andy Card, who may never have had a one-on-one conversation with a reporter before becoming chief of staff); and David Axelrod, the administration’s main media strategist, is a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

But even a president predisposed to the press (and with a press predisposed to him) is sooner or later going to snap. And, worth noting, no president, after years of campaigning, is all that predisposed. Presidents, on a good day, regard almost all members of the press as mean-spirited, lazy, and only occasionally useful.

All presidents begin with a theory on how to tame the beast.

The Clinton administration came to Washington with the logical, if boneheaded, idea that the best way to deal with the press was to move it out of the West Wing and keep it at arm’s length—a gambit which cost the Clinton White House, from the get-go, the goodwill of the people whom, next to Congress, it needed most.

The Obama approach has been more subtle but, in its way, more threatening. Even before formally taking possession of the White House and pressroom, the team began to talk about keeping Obama’s much vaunted peer-to-peer network of millions of small contributors in place, of making it a central outlet of its communications strategy. The implication seemed clear: newspapers and networks had a swiftly declining market, while the Obama administration had created an audience that it could reach through its own distribution prowess and that hung on its every word.

Even given the isolation and provincialism of the Washington press corps, with the cracker-barrel feeling of the White House pressroom itself—the obvious languor and boredom of people hanging around the same small space and having the same conversations year after year, administration after administration—it would be impossible, at this recessionary moment, for the Fourth Estate to feel anything less than pure dread.

The pressroom is top-heavy with anachronisms. There are the urban dailies, such as the Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, the L.A. Times, each a paper whose closing could be imminent. Then the networks, whose commitment to the evening news is ever less sure. There’s the newspaper division of the Washington Post Co., which lost $53.8 million in the first quarter and which is increasingly overshadowed by Kaplan, the educational-testing company that supplies most of the revenues for its parent company (“If The Washington Post still exists, that would be news to me,” said one new Web entrant in the Washington press corps). And then The New York Times, traditionally the single most important factor in the setting of the political agenda, now in the midst of a business crisis from which few expect it will emerge intact.

The balance of power has surely shifted—although you won’t get anyone in the White House to say that. Except every day you can read it in press secretary Gibbs’s cockiness and condescension.

You have to understand the primitiveness of the daily briefing—it’s a ritualistic sumo of dominance and submission. At least since the Bush-father administration (after the brilliance of the Reagan press operation), it’s mostly been the press dominating whoever the press secretary is, and the press secretary trying to avoid being broken as he or she does the job of trying to avoid giving out information. Among press secretaries in recent memory, there’s been the drowning George Stephanopoulos, the angry Ari Fleischer, and the hapless and tongue-tied Scott McClellan. (Exceptions include Tony Snow, the Fox News anchor, who continued to act like a television host, and Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart, whose approach was, at nearly any cost, to please the press.)

Gibbs has reversed this dynamic. It’s not just that he successfully holds the pressroom at bay. It’s that he clearly doesn’t take the press very seriously. Gibbs is perfectly affable and even, in his way, courtly. And yet he seems to be not quite listening. Nothing touches him. This is no doubt partly because everybody understands he’s in like Flynn. Unlike with most press secretaries, where the press has the leverage of often knowing more than the press secretary, who is usually a relatively weak West Wing link, Gibbs really knows all, apparently—he’s as present as anyone in the creation of Obama policy. There is too the Obama 30-point advantage—he’s got America eating out of his hand. Gibbs has, at least so far, an easy product to sell. And then there’s the personal insecurity on the part of members of the incredible shrinking press—their days are numbered and they know it.

All of which might have something to do in the dominance-and-submission equation with why, at the president’s 100-day press conference, there were no questions about the bailouts or Afghanistan, perhaps the two most intractable issues facing the administration. When the other guy is strong and you are weak, you try to behave yourself.

And yet, a funny thing: Gibbs, who surely knows something about the dwindling life of the establishment media, who as Obama’s campaign spokesperson was part of the most sophisticated new-media outreach program in politics, who is, with his own personal access and his boss’s overwhelming popularity, beholden to nobody, nevertheless appears to be playing the press game as straight and as conventionally and, in a sense, as humbly as it’s ever been played. “His M.O.,” says David Corn, a longtime Washington reporter who is a regular at the daily briefing, is “to talk to the dinosaurs.”

The established news organizations may have almost no pulse left in them, but you wouldn’t get an inkling of such a reversal in fortunes from the White House’s ritual obeisance. The hierarchy evidently remains as fixed as it’s ever been. The “change” guys have altered nothing. It might as well be, say, 1995, with the Times, the Post, the networks, CNN, the newsweeklies, and even 88-year-old Helen Thomas (I say 1995 because that was before the advent of Fox News, which, unlike in the Bush administration, where it was the first point of contact and virtual mouthpiece, hardly exists in the Obama media point of view) all given a regal pride of place.

In fact, it almost seems as though the Obama people have abandoned that grail of all White Houses, to bypass the mainstream media and go directly to the people, to get the message out, pure and unfiltered—which, with their millions of e-mail addresses and Twitter followers, never seemed so possible as now.

Instead, they’re wooing The New York Times as assiduously as Pierre Salinger did on behalf of John Kennedy in 1962. And, perhaps not surprisingly, The New York Times woos back—rewarding the president with a lavishness of coverage not seen since, well, J.F.K. in 1962. It’s an establishment lovefest.

It’s some perfect re-creation of a relationship between president and news media that has not been seen since the White House pressroom was a clubby place with reporters invited into the press secretary’s office for whiskey and cigars. It’s cozy. Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, who would have been, in previous administrations, the highest and most exclusive White House sources, have become almost casual quotes for the Times.

It is, curiously, a return to a time when the press was so much more dependent on the goodwill, and susceptible to the care and feeding, of the president. Indeed, The New York Times, and the rest of the established press, needs Barack Obama a lot more than he needs them.

Courting the dinosaurs, the Obama people feed the increasingly hungry new media the scraps—and manage, mostly, to have them thankful for them.

The Huffington Post has become an ideal back door for the most partisan stuff. It’s being used in a way that suddenly seems not all that dissimilar to how the Bush White House used Fox News. It’s as obvious and as unfiltered.

In other words, the Obama people have purchase on both established media and partisan media. If the Bush people ran a singular, blaring, drumbeating message, the Obama people are running a message across numerous spectra of purpose and subtlety and payoff. Indeed, while the Times seems reserved for the more weighty exegesis, and the HuffPo for its attacks, Politico, the politics-focused site that began during the last political campaign and is now trying to build an off-election-cycle business, has become the prime outlet for Obama White House gossip—the fuel of the day’s political kibitzing, the candy by which an odd intimacy is created with both the media and the political hard core. It’s politics as a short take—politics as an item. “They use it for the quick pops. They get the headline out there. They short-circuit analysis. They keep momentum going. All day, rat-a-tat-tat,” says one pressroom-watcher. “They essentially write it themselves.”

And this may not even be the most powerful part of the White House press strategy. If most of the press is failing, one part is rising: the celebrity press. Now, the central formulation of the celebrity press, codified in the early days of People magazine by its first and legendary editor, Dick Stolley, is that, in the descending preference of who makes a good cover, from movie star to television star to sports figure to sick child, the one category of celebrity you ought never to choose is politician.

Arguably, the celebrity press came into existence and has grown with such force as a reflection of America’s disenchantment with and lack of interest in politics and politicians. Civic life lost its connection to popular culture.

Until Obama. Now, in the hierarchy of celebrities, nobody ranks as high, or is as cover-worthy, as the president and his family.

Inside Edition, the syndicated tabloid show which specializes in the frothiest celebrity news and goriest celebrity scandals, now looks for an Obama angle on whatever story it’s pursuing. “Any story gets hotter if you’ve got Obama in it,” says a producer on the show.

As for Michelle Obama, she may seem to be everywhere—the most revered and omnipresent woman in the land—but this is in fact a function of her lack of availability. The First Lady appears in public only about three days a week. Exclusivity and unattainability make the brand.

Indeed, the efforts at control—negotiating all the nuances of celebrity coverage—by the White House press team are pretty much at the levels of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

‘Of course there are changes going on, but we’re message focused—we believe our message will find its audience,” says young Burton as the press clamors outside his small office.

It’s a cat-that’s-eaten-the-canary kind of thing.

They have been handed a most remarkable historical moment—in which they get to remake the media in their own image. They have the power and they are the subject. These people in this White House are in greater control of the media than any administration before them.